Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Road Trippin': Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives From On The Road To The Road, Scott M. Obernesser
Road Trippin': Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives From On The Road To The Road, Scott M. Obernesser
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
"Road Trippin:’ Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives and Petrocultures from On The Road to The Road" examines late-twentieth century U.S. road narratives in an effort to trace the development of American petrocultures geographically and culturally in the decades after World War II. The highway stories that gain popularity throughout the era trace not simply how Americans utilize oil, but how the postwar American oil ethos in literature, film, and music acts upon and shapes human interiority and vice versa. Roads and highways frame my critique because they are at once networks of commerce transportation and producers of a unique, romantic …
Speak'st, Art Sound: The Material Voice In Early Modern England, Nathaniel Philip Likert
Speak'st, Art Sound: The Material Voice In Early Modern England, Nathaniel Philip Likert
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis argues that early moderns conceived of speech as a material phenomenon; voice struck out from bodies into environments. Early modern voices thus participate in what sound studies scholars call the soundscape, which I link to current new materialist and ecological theories of network and assemblage. Within this soundscape, I pay special attention to the role of language as a semantic system of meaning. Current ecological criticism takes for granted the utter “flatness” of ontology, and as such discards the question of human language so central to previous deconstructive and discursive scholarship. My thesis attempts to account for the …
Strangers Among Us: Invasive Plants In British Literature, 1669-1800., Thomas Lance Bullington
Strangers Among Us: Invasive Plants In British Literature, 1669-1800., Thomas Lance Bullington
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Exotic flora in the long eighteenth century (1666-1800) embodied a point of contact between the natural and imaginary worlds, bearing witness to the ways that ideology relocates living things according to human desire. Most accounts view these exotics through the lens of ecological imperialism and “invasive” species. Both of these terms are twenty-first century metaphors that materialize the role of imperialism in circulating exotics, applying the narrative of invading British empire to the behavior of foreign plants. However, such accounts do not fully acknowledge the cultural work that images of foreign plants do. I opt instead for an ecocritical reappraisal …
The Delicate Art Of Being: Psychological Responses To Environmental Damage In American Fiction Of The 1970s, Andrew Timothy Thomas
The Delicate Art Of Being: Psychological Responses To Environmental Damage In American Fiction Of The 1970s, Andrew Timothy Thomas
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This Master’s thesis looks at three works of American literature from the 1970s—James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970), Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree (1979), and Leslie MarSilko’s Ceremony (1977)—with two primary research questions in mind: How do these novels act as responses to the politicization and globalization of the American environmental movement? and How do these novels depict psychological responses to ongoing environmental damage and destruction? This study is particularly interested in depictions of abjected environments inhabited by socially abjected people. Through investigations of ecohorror, ecotrauma, and ecomelancholy as manifested in aesthetic representations of abjected environments, I read these three environmentally aware texts as …
Craig Santos Perez: Poetry As Strategy Against Military Occupation In Guåhan (Guam), Robert John Briggs
Craig Santos Perez: Poetry As Strategy Against Military Occupation In Guåhan (Guam), Robert John Briggs
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis is interested in hearing the voices seldom heard. It looks at the poetry of Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamorro from Guam, in an attempt to begin puzzling out the idea of transformation in Guam and the military's complicity in the process. While erasure seems to be trending and emerging as a term that would, on the surface, adequately bring attention to the loss of culture, land, and language in Guam, it has the tendency to overshadow and ignore the varying degrees that Guam has changed in the presence of military rule. Other forms of transformation include, but …
The Gay Of The Land: Queer Ecology And The Literature Of The 1960s, Jill Elizabeth Anderson
The Gay Of The Land: Queer Ecology And The Literature Of The 1960s, Jill Elizabeth Anderson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In this dissertation I argue not only that queer ecology is a legitimate and important next step for ecocritics and queer theorists but also that its literary application does a great amount of good in exploring and dismantling the natural/unnatural binary and exposing the ecological impact of the choices humans make everyday. I take as my method a combination of queer and environmental theory and literary criticism, as well as the foundational queer ecocritical works and include important historical and political perspectives influencing the emergence of the environmental and gay and lesbian movements. Through this dissertation, I legitimize more recent …